The Pharaoh

Is Zahi Hawass bad for Egyptology?

Hawass has allowed the space between the discipline of Egyptian archeology and its popularization to shrink almost to nothing.Credit FLOC’H

Zahi Hawass, the Egyptian archeologist, is a lordly, well-dressed man of sixty-two, with white hair and small dark eyes. He likes to take the passenger seat in his chauffeured S.U.V., but he doesn’t turn his head when he’s talking to someone in the seats behind; he looks directly ahead, and shouts at the windshield. He often asks rhetorical questions along the lines of “God gave me this talent for public speaking—what can I do?” Visitors to his office, in Cairo, may hear him on the telephone to an airline representative, saying, “No, madam! A first-class ticket, for a first-class passenger!”

Among the National Geographic Society’s Explorers-in-Residence—Jane Goodall and a dozen favored others—Hawass is the only one to have a staff of thirty thousand people. For the past seven years, he has been the secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, or S.C.A., which oversees Egypt’s ancient sites and artifacts, and controls access to them. Hawass, who in June played host to President Barack Obama on a ninety-minute tour of the Pyramids and the Sphinx, at Giza, near Cairo, is the international star of Egyptology, thanks largely to a steady flow of television documentaries and books to which he is attached, with titles built out of the words “mummies,” “gold,” “sand,” and “mystery.” He is also the field’s C.E.O.—or, as he puts it, “in charge of everything in Egypt.” It’s as if Jacques Cousteau, in his heyday, had taken on the task of approving everyone else’s scuba-diving permit.

The oddity of this role, at the intersection of archeology, show business, and national politics, makes controversy unavoidable, but Hawass is so often found in the middle of an argument that one can usually assume the fuss is strategic. He appears to be enlivened and empowered by battles with enemies, real or imagined: overseas archeologists, foreign museums, amateur theorists who speculate that the Pyramids were built by lizards, other “assholes.” And he enjoys making provocative announcements in which his force of character must carry listeners past skepticism, as when he says that he is about to find the body of Cleopatra, or make a German museum return its bust of Nefertiti, or somehow copyright the shape of a pyramid. When I met him, this summer, his dominant conversational tone was rebuttal laced with invective and self-regard, built on the premise—it has some merit—that the international standing of Egypt is powerfully connected to the standing of Zahi Hawass. He has no doubt that his fame is a vital national asset.

One morning in early July, he was driven from central Cairo to meet an American television-news crew that was waiting for him at the Pyramids, about ten miles away. On the elevated freeway, Hawass’s driver pushed through the traffic as if insulted by the existence of other cars. (“If he slows down, he’s fired,” Hawass told me later, laughing. “If I’m dying, I’m dying. I don’t mind if I’m dead.”) During the ride, which gave a view on both sides of cinder-block apartment buildings topped with clusters of satellite dishes, the conversation turned to “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs,” an exhibition of artifacts from the Cairo Museum, which, since 2005, has visited seven cities around the world, in an echo of a similar show in the nineteen-seventies. I had met Hawass in San Francisco, a few days earlier, when the exhibition opened at the de Young Museum, in Golden Gate Park. “I thought that sending an exhibit like King Tut can make good money, and this is what I did!” he said in the car. Hawass speaks English fast, with a strong accent, and in a tone that, after a while, you come to realize doesn’t denote outright fury. He said that, by next spring, when “Tutankhamun” is due in New York, on its final U.S. stop, the show will have made more than a hundred million dollars for the S.C.A. “We sent King Tut thirty years ago, and Egypt did not make one penny.” (This is not quite true.) “And if people say it’s commercial? Fuck you! Our exhibit is more scientific than any exhibit in any museum in the world.”

Hawass, who has a Ph.D. in Egyptology, had touched on a key theme: the contrast, as he sees it, between Egypt’s past acquiescence to foreign cultural demands—he made the point with a vivid sexual image—and the alpha-male assurance of his tenure at the S.C.A., which he sees as marked by strong rules, good publicity, profit, and new museums. (He has opened half a dozen of them.) He made a jab at one of his predecessors. “He has no personality!” Hawass said. When he was seen with this man in public, he said, “people always greeted me and they didn’t know him. He got very upset. I said, ‘The people greet me because there is something I did that they see.’ ”

The S.U.V. barely braked as it passed through the gates at Giza, then mounted the desert plateau, where most vehicles are banned. The Great Pyramid suddenly filled the view ahead. Across the sand, in all directions, workers raised their hands in salute as the car passed. We were the only fast-moving dot in a monumental landscape, which gave our progress a video-game quality. We skirted the pyramid—not quite a squeal of tires—then slowed before the Sphinx. Hawass reached into the back seat for a brown, sweat-stained Stetson hat that, at some moment subsequent to the release of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” became a key Hawass accessory. He strode onto a wooden walkway, where the American TV crew had set up, doubtless briefed to a point of terror about Hawass’s views on punctuality. The first question was “Doctor, this is a very historic area. Can you tell us about it?,” which made one consider, with sympathy, how much time Hawass must spend with people delighted to hear any well-worn proclamation. The temptation to say “I can smell royal mummies”—one that Hawass does not always resist—must be strong.

Hawass likes to tease Omar Sharif—the star of “Doctor Zhivago,” and a friend and frequent dining companion of his—that he has become the better-known man. Sharif, in turn, calls Hawass “a tremendous actor” and a great communicator. Lecturing in Atlanta not long ago, Hawass filled a theatre with a paying audience of forty-five hundred. John Ford, the president of the Discovery Channel—which is an avid consumer of ancient-Egyptian material—values Hawass for combining academic authority with “the enthusiasm of a nine-year-old boy. It’s as if he’s seeing things for the first time.” The History Channel is developing a multi-part series with Hawass at its center. When I visited Alexandria with Hawass in July, Japanese tourists snapped their attention from Pompey’s Pillar to him, and asked, with wonder, “Is it really Zahi?”

Among Egyptological colleagues, Hawass’s reputation is less clear. Egyptastic, a satirical Web site run by two Britons, posts Onion-style fake-news stories that often reflect professional annoyance with him. (“Hawass: ‘Ancient Egyptians Worshipped Hawass-like God’ ”; “Hawass Discovers Tomb of Boy-King Tutankhamun.”) A recent story began, “Zahi Hawass has today denounced his own wife as a ‘liar’ and a ‘friend of the chaos god Seth,’ following her claim last week to have discovered the couple’s briefly misplaced television remote control.”

Egyptology is a small, backbiting world. Internationally, fewer than seven hundred scholars work full time in the field, in no more than a hundred institutions; people labor for decades waiting for a professor to move aside, or die. But this can only partly explain the strength of feeling about Hawass. Colleagues complain that he excavates incautiously, puts public relations before science, hypes his own archeological finds, and takes credit owed to others. Even his admirers are likely to concede some of the charges. Salima Ikram, a wry Pakistani professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, has been a friend of Hawass’s for two decades; when we met in Egypt, she described the Hawass regime, in a matter-of-fact way, as a “dictatorship,” and noted that S.C.A. press releases had announced archeological discoveries in Egypt “without even the name of the person who’s been working there for twenty years.” She went on, “It’s an appropriation of intellectual property. And, for us, for academics, what else do we have?” But she was largely supportive, noting the solid foundations of Hawass’s expertise, and his undeniable stamina. “He’s trying to do in ten years what takes fifty years to do,” she said.

Others, speaking less warmly, asked for anonymity, on the ground that the S.C.A. can withhold or withdraw permission to work in Egypt. Hawass has publicly banished perceived rule-breakers, including Joann Fletcher, a British archeologist who, in a 2003 television documentary, claimed to have identified the mummy of Queen Nefertiti; she had not first submitted her findings to the S.C.A., as the rules require. (A member of Fletcher’s team disputes this.) Among the wary scholars, one said that some Egyptologists hope not to make the kind of spectacular discovery that would cause Hawass to take an interest in it. Another, in Cairo, said, “He dictates knowledge. He declares something to be true, and everyone’s supposed to accept it without properly evaluating the hard evidence.” Another said, baldly, “This man is destroying our academic discipline.” In the view of Dan Lines, one of the creators of Egyptastic, who has left Egyptology, and can thus speak without fear of exile, “He’s ridiculous, and yet you have to take him very seriously. He has influence not only over the people who have to deal with him but over the heritage of an entire country.”

Yet even Hawass’s harshest critics are willing to place his swagger in context; that is, they recognize that ancient Egypt has been largely in foreign hands for two hundred years. As Hawass reminded me, of the sixty-three tombs that have been found in the Valley of the Kings, near the city of Luxor—the most famous being Tutankhamun’s, opened by an Englishman in 1922—not one was excavated by a team led by an Egyptian. Hawass’s task—in effect, to Egyptianize Egyptology by means of a personality cult—is not an easy one.

Duncan Lees, a British specialist in three-dimensional imaging and a sometime television presenter, almost came to blows with Hawass a few years ago, when they worked on a television broadcast from an archeological site in the western desert that Hawass has named the Valley of the Golden Mummies. Between 1999 and 2001, Hawass oversaw a dig there that unearthed more than two hundred mummies of the Greco-Roman period. It was an interesting site, but one observer has said that the work there was “scandalous, and done just for TV”; later, visitors found themselves walking on a desert littered with human bones. By 2004, excavations had stopped, but they were re-started for a week of live TV broadcasts, and Lees was hired by a production company to make laser-derived measurements of the site. He was dismayed by Hawass’s irregular on-air archeological style: Hawass broke through the mud-brick entrance to a tomb with a hammer, and he handled a human skull carelessly. Lees also found him imperious. One day, Lees stepped between Hawass and a man he was scolding. “He couldn’t believe I’d done that,” Lees recalled. “He flipped. He said to me, ‘You’ll never work in Egypt again. You’ll never get home. Your equipment will disappear.’ ” (Hawass, recalling the incident, said that Lees was at the site “without official permission, without my knowledge. I was so angry.”) Lees said of Hawass, “I believe he’s a greedy man. He likes the kudos, he likes people fawning all over him, but at the same time he’s also very protective of how his country is perceived, and there’s every reason for Egyptians to be paranoid about people coming in and shitting on their heritage.”

According to Salima Ikram, “Zahi’s agenda is, one, to improve the Supreme Council of Antiquities as a body. Two, to improve the level of Egyptology as practiced by Egyptians. Three, to push forward Egypt in a positive way to the world, so people focus on antiquities rather than on fundamentalism or terrorism. And, four, to push forward Zahi Hawass. At different times, different things take the upper hand. And he’s not always conscious of what he’s doing, and sometimes he acts in haste and repents.”

The complexities of Hawass’s job are immediately suggested by the layout of his offices, in a modern building on a quiet street in downtown Cairo. Visitors approach Hawass through an outer office staffed by Egyptians. Here supplicants, wearing once-a-year ties, measure their status by noting whether or not they have been offered tea.

But a person who followed the corridor around to the left, then turned right, would find another room connecting to his inner office—from the other side. Hawass calls this his “foreign office.” In July, interns from Princeton were assisting two young Egyptologists, one Canadian and one British. Janice Kamrin, an American with a Ph.D., whom Hawass calls “my right hand,” was away when I visited. The team’s tasks include editing Hawass’s writing in English, which appears in glossy books, on his Web site, and in a column for Al-Ahram Weekly, an English-language newspaper. (This process is at times quite thorough, and can amount to more than just editing.) A framed clipping of the entry about Hawass in the 2006 edition of the Time 100 list of influential people hung on the wall, as did a letter from Hillary Clinton congratulating him on his appointment to the S.C.A. directorship.

Kamrin later told me, “My job is to be invisible.” The English-language room is not clandestine, but the two-office operation points to the life of politics required of the man who sits in between them, beneath a photograph—faded to mauve in the sunlight—of President Hosni Mubarak. Hawass is an Egyptian government official who keeps an Emmy on his bookcase. (It’s a “commemorative” Emmy, bought by the winner of a regional Emmy, to thank Hawass for his part in a show.) Elliott Colla, of Georgetown University, who has written on the history of Egyptology, recently said of Hawass, “To the Egyptians, he’s upholding claims of Egyptian sovereignty and claims of modern Egyptians to be the direct descendants of ancient Egyptians. And, insofar as any Egyptians care about Egyptology, that’s pretty much all they care about.” At the same time, Hawass “keeps foreign interest flowing, because without that he wouldn’t have a job. He understands that he has to keep the door open not just to scientists but to the Discovery Channel. He understands that Egyptology has a fully symbiotic relationship with Egpytomania.” He went on, “Kitsch is the life-support system for the science of Egyptology. Scientists don’t get funding unless the media is keeping up the flow of images.”

I spent a few days in and out of Hawass’s office, where he likes to take phone calls while simultaneously signing handwritten invoices and rebuking subordinates. In the manner of many powerful bureaucrats, Hawass layered his meetings one on top of another; the office was always full. Bruce Ludwig, a wealthy American friend of his, and a long-term funder of archeology in Egypt, told me that, in the same office, he once watched the representative of an Asian country try to push an envelope of cash across the desk. “Zahi got out of his chair, screaming at the guy,” Ludwig recalls. Hawass has certainly made money beyond his S.C.A. salary—he says that President Mubarak once jokingly asked him if he earned as much for a lecture as Henry Kissinger—but not in this way, according to many.

While I was at the office, a Zahi Hawass Day plaque arrived from Indianapolis, and a European delegation tried to close a deal for a Tutankhamun exhibit. A graphic designer showed Hawass possible jackets for a new book of his, “The Lost Tombs of Thebes.” (He has published more than a dozen books.) After quickly approving one of the designs, Hawass noted, in the pleasant tone of a person forced to say something crushingly obvious, “I think you have to enlarge the name.” I also heard him speak on the phone with Kathleen Martinez, a Dominican lawyer turned archeologist who, in recent years, has been searching for Cleopatra’s tomb in the north of the country, near Alexandria. He and Martinez were anticipating a visit to Egypt by Leonel Fernández, the President of the Dominican Republic; Hawass regretted that he would not be in Cairo to deliver the full “Obama tour.” (According to Hawass’s memory of Obama’s visit, the President called him an “international treasure”; and, when Hawass told Obama that he looked like King Tut, he replied, “I’ve been told that.”)

One afternoon, I found Hawass in the middle of his office, trouserless, changing his suit while in conversation with Brando Quilici, an independent Italian television producer who has now made four long-term, expensive films with Hawass, for the Discovery Channel and National Geographic.

“What are you doing, doctor?” Quilici asked him.

“I’m making myself pretty,” Hawass explained. He had an interview with Egyptian television later in the day.

When these men first met, in 2003, Hawass was already famous enough to have received lewd e-mails from female fans overseas. But Quilici seems to have enhanced the brand; his skill is in drawing drama from Egyptological stories that lack new tombs or gold. (He built one nail-biting scene out of a computer reboot.) He puts Hawass at the center of films made in a hybrid style that combines some sweaty activity underground—hat, denim shirt, arched eyebrows—with forensic revelation in the laboratory. Designed above all for male viewers in their late teens and twenties—“C.S.I.” fans—the films talk up a gap in knowledge until it has become a “mystery,” and then, urgently, the mystery is solved.

In the first show, the fragmented and mummified body of Tutankhamun was placed inside a CAT scanner, and sculptors were commissioned to make reconstructions of Tutankhamun’s head (revealing that the boy-king less resembles Obama than Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com). “We are in the presence of a king,” Hawass said, on the air. “And that’s why we should look at him with respect.” Another show sought to identify a mummy, taken from the Valley of the Kings, as Queen Hatshepsut. (“We are under the mountain now, can you imagine? I think we are almost now four hundred and fifty feet under the ground! It’s very difficult to breathe. I can feel there’s no oxygen.”)

A new, two-part film, “King Tut Unwrapped,” was shot during the past two years. “The Hatshepsut show was cool, but this will be huge!” Quilici said in Hawass’s office; he has an easy, amused manner. He promised DNA-derived discoveries about relatives of Tutankhamun, news about Tutankhamun’s early death, and the innovation of a camera fixed to Hawass’s trademark hat. Quilici had been worried that Hawass would not approve, until Abigail Harper, his co-producer, had an idea: “If we call it the Zahicam, he will love it.”

Asked to explain the enduringly strong television market for ancient-Egyptian material, Quilici said that it was powered by the strangeness of mummies, by dreams of adventure, and (in so many words) by a dependable schedule of domestic flights. Although one could hope to make similar films about other cultures, “here it’s accessible. The Valley of the Kings is there, the mummies are there. It’s a new frontier, but at the same time it’s a very accessible frontier.” I later spoke to Terry Garcia, the executive vice-president for mission programs at the National Geographic Society, who acknowledged that he has heard from plaintive archeologists in other fields, who “sometimes point out the fact that perhaps the world is a little too fascinated by Egyptian archeology, to the exclusion of other civilizations.”

To the discomfort of some Egyptologists, Hawass is more than a participant in Quilici’s breathless shows; he is a collaborator, in a way that allows the space between the discipline of Egyptology and its popularization to shrink almost to nothing. Though Quilici’s films may appear to report on projects set in motion by Egyptians, they are largely initiatives pitched to the S.C.A. Quilici told me that he presents ideas to Hawass, and “if he likes it he does it.” The National Geographic Society arranged for the scanner to come to Cairo, and Quilici, with the Discovery Channel, set up, and paid for, the DNA laboratory. (Hawass had previously been dismissive about the idea of DNA work on mummies.) Hawass’s brusque manner does not make him a natural television personality, but he has the keys to the country, and has no objection to seeing himself—an Egyptian politician with a formidable management style—reflected in the Western media as Indiana Jones. He makes an astute trade: access for attention. He can make the red tape fall away, and, in return, television tells a story of Egyptian Egyptology. Quilici said of Hawass, “Once he’s excited, there are no barriers,” adding, “When you work with big archeologists, they are always concerned what their colleagues will say: Will we do it right? Should we dig here? Maybe we won’t find anything. Zahi is not scared. He goes. He has this incredible energy, and an amazing gut feeling.”

Hawass’s dynamism is impressive, yet one can imagine how galling this sketch might sound to another archeologist. On the air, Hawass looks likes an Egyptologist of childhood imagination: he can follow any whim, and enter any tomb, without a thought of permissions, grant proposals, or tenure. Modern archeologists take enormous care, with latex gloves and measuring devices, to invest a somewhat haphazard activity with the trappings of science. Ideally, their satisfaction derives from uncovering information, not treasure troves. Hawass, as seen on TV, appears to be from another era. A young European academic told me that some Egyptologists watch Hawass with disapproval mixed “with a little bit of jealousy: we’d all like to don the big hat and go breaking into tombs.” The modern way can be “a little too precious,” she said. Howard Carter, the discoverer of Tutankhamun, struck a similarly wistful note in 1923, when he contemplated the kind of work that had been done a hundred years before him. “Those were the great days of excavating,” he wrote. “Anything to which a fancy was taken, from a scarab to an obelisk, was just appropriated, and if there was a difference of opinion with a brother excavator one laid for him with a gun.”

After the Hatshepsut film first aired, in 2007, Hawass was criticized for identifying the Queen’s mummy on television before making his evidence available in a scholarly way. The relevant DNA work has just been submitted to a journal, Hawass told me. (Hawass’s writing, when not for a mass audience, tends to appear in Festschrifts that are not peer-reviewed.) When I saw Hawass in Cairo, he was determined to avoid having the same criticisms levelled at “King Tut Unwrapped,” and wanted to make sure that a paper was published before its first broadcast. The film was nearly finished, and, according to Quilici, the Discovery Channel was eager to show it right away, and to start seeing a return on its investment. But a DNA expert, one of many co-authors of an accompanying scientific paper, had asked for extra weeks to write up his contribution of a few paragraphs, and he could not be hurried. The film would have to wait.

Despite this complication, which Hawass and Quilici had been discussing, Hawass was in a playful mood as he changed for the TV studio. “Everybody close his eyes!” he cried out when, still without his trousers, he had to fetch something from the English-speaking office. (At this moment, one could understand why Andres Numhauser, an exhibitions executive who works with Hawass on the “Tutankhamun” shows, had described Hawass as someone “who seems to have a very strong personality but is a sweet man.”) Before Hawass left his office—to be driven through rush-hour traffic, with his driver using a police siren—he asked Quilici for advice. Should he agree to speak publicly about Pharaonic-era references to wine drinking, in order to help support the Egyptian wine industry? A wine manufacturer had made the request.

“Yes,” Quilici said. “I think it’s nice.”

“I should charge them?”

“Of course, Zahi.”

A pause. “I need an agent. I am shy.”

Hawass’s tendency toward self-flattery obscures his past; when, reluctantly, he talks of his upbringing, his words have the texture of a Soviet-era account of Stalin’s boyhood. We know that he was born in 1947, five years before Nasser’s revolution, in a village near the city of Damietta, in the north of Egypt. Beyond that: “I was a famous soccer player, and the people loved me. . . . When I was young, I used to make plays, theatre, cultural activities in my village. And I was like the leader of the kids, they followed me. In everything.” Moreover, “All the ladies in the village, they were in love with me and wanted to marry me.”

Hawass went on, “I’m not the son of a minister or an important man. And I don’t think that anyone in Egypt like me, from an ordinary family, has become a public figure.” (This seemed to overlook Presidents Nasser and Sadat, among others.) His father—“a good man, proud of himself”—was a farmer, who died when Zahi was thirteen, leaving his mother with six children. Zahi was the oldest son. Asked about the impact of this on him, Hawass said, “None at all.” At sixteen, he went to college in Alexandria, to study archeology of the Greco-Roman period. He graduated after four years, at a moment of national trauma: Egypt’s defeat by Israel in the Six-Day War, in 1967. “I was so sad,” he said. “We lost the war because of corruption!” (Hawass, in later life, has spoken harshly of Israel; earlier this year, after the invasion of Gaza, he wrote, in Arabic, “The only things that the Israelis have learned from history are methods of tyranny and torture.”) Hawass said that although he was not obliged to do military service—as an oldest son, he was exempt, he said—he decided to serve all the same. But when he presented himself to the authorities in Alexandria “a stupid man treated me badly, insulted me, without any reason, and I thought, This is not an army, and I left.”

In 1968, Hawass was hired by the Department of Antiquities, the forerunner of the S.C.A., to be an inspector—a government official attached to an archeological dig or an ancient site. This was a job for life: a dependable, if lowly, spot in the giant public-sector bureaucracy that had emerged since the revolution. Posted at different sites across Egypt, Hawass was resentful of the desert, scornful of his superiors, underpaid, and—on the evidence of one photograph of a spectacular checked sports coat—overdressed. According to David Sims, an American expatriate in Cairo, who met Hawass in the late sixties and became his friend, “He certainly wasn’t that good a student, and I don’t think at the time he was starry-eyed about the Pharaohs.” In Cairo, he sometimes stayed with Sims, who recalled, laughing, “Most Egyptian men are ladies’ men, but they’re terrible at it. Zahi’s one of the successful ones.”

In time, Hawass was promoted, and he began to find the work more tolerable, particularly after 1974, when he moved to Giza and was given an office in a group of buildings overlooked by the Great Pyramid. Fadel Gad, a close friend who also worked in the Antiquities Department, said recently, “The Pyramids made Zahi, I must say that. Zahi found a window of opportunity to look on the world and the world to see him. Anyone who comes to the Pyramids sees Zahi.”

Gad recalled accompanying him to a Grateful Dead concert in front of the Sphinx, in the late seventies. Gad found the experience astonishing. “I felt like all the United States of America was there,” he said. “And everybody was smoking dope, everybody’s getting high, girls are on the guys’ shoulders. I was culture-shocked, in my own country.” Did Hawass disapprove? “He didn’t disapprove! We were enjoying it. We were young, you know, and all this testosterone, and the girls were, of course, fun. We were going crazy, too.” Hawass did not recall going with Gad. He said that he attended the concert alone, for work reasons, and in a 2001 column he shuddered at the memory: “Young people standing, shouting, screaming, drinking beer, and I even saw some foreigners smoking.”

Hawass was by now married to a woman from his home village. (He and his wife, Fekhira, a gynecologist, have two adult sons.) At the time, Hawass told me, “I was doing good work, but I was not well educated. I didn’t know anything. I was a stupid asshole.” He took a one-year postgraduate course in Egyptology at Cairo University. Gad recalled that, upon finishing, Hawass considered a career as a tour guide—at a salary far higher than the one he received from the Antiquities Department; instead, he won a Fulbright grant, and a place in the Ph.D. program at the University of Pennsylvania. He started in 1980, and was an “outstanding” student, according to his thesis supervisor, David O’Connor, a senior Egyptologist who still digs in Egypt, and is now a professor at N.Y.U.’s Institute of Fine Arts. Hawass was in Philadelphia for seven years, returning to Egypt at the age of forty. “I came back here as a solid scholar,” Hawass said. His fondness for the United States survives, despite the occasional political inconvenience of that position and the risks to his dignity posed by the Homeland Security process. (“They put me in this room with Mexicans!” he told me.) Hawass vacations in Los Angeles, loves expensive California wine, and recently saw “Jersey Boys” on Broadway. He talked with gentleness about the Metropolitan Museum—not its collection but his pleasure in sitting alone on the front steps on a Sunday morning, watching people come and go.

By his return to Egypt, in 1987, the Department of Antiquities had been renamed the Egyptian Antiquities Organization. (It became the S.C.A. a few years later.) Hawass was appointed director of the section whose sites included Giza. He was now in charge of the Pyramids, and gave himself responsibility for “changing the plateau from a zoo to an open park.” His zeal in this effort—he erected fences and shooed away tourist-trade camels—made him an enemy of local residents; some of them, he believed, said prayers against him. Hawass has written that his Giza strategy became “a standard for UNESCO,” which is an overstatement. Indeed, some S.C.A.-sanctioned work during his term has been condemned for its aggressive attempt to strip sites of their later history, turning them into islands of antique purity, easily legible to tourists.

As an archeologist, Hawass “knows a lot about the Giza plateau,” Salima Ikram told me. “At the Pyramids, Zahi really did do some fabulous work.” Along with digs that Hawass has run at Saqqara, a little farther south, and in the Valley of the Golden Mummies, in the western desert, the work at Giza is his greatest archeological achievement. In particular, excavations led by Hawass and Mark Lehner, an American Egyptologist and a friend, revealed much about the lives of the builders of the pyramids: their bakeries, workshops, and tombs. In 1990, a cemetery containing the tombs of hundreds of pyramid builders began to be uncovered; Hawass has called the find “as important as the tomb of King Tut.”

When we spoke, Hawass referred to Giza as “a place near my heart.” Asked to recall a moment that touched him on the plateau, he mentioned an excavation in 1990, when he opened the tomb of a dwarf named Perniankhu and found a basalt statue that he regards as a masterpiece of the period. The figure is seated, the body a little lopsided, and hieroglyphic text reads, “The one who delights his lord every day, the King’s Dwarf, Perniankhu of the Great Palace.” When Hawass took the statue in his hands, he told me, “it was one of the most beautiful moments in my life, as if I were holding my first son.” This moment occurred during a press conference: journalists had been invited to watch the opening of the chamber.

At Giza, the new glimpse of an ancient workforce aided Hawass in another project, which was rhetorical. In the years leading up to the millennium, there was a spike in profitable pseudoscience about Giza. Alternative theorists argued that the area showed evidence of a civilization far older than that of ancient Egypt, one with roots elsewhere on the planet, or on some other planet. In 1993, “The Mystery of the Sphinx,” an NBC show generous to such thoughts, had an audience of twenty million. Hawass didn’t turn away from the trend. He kept a library of relevant books in his office, and rarely gave an interview in English without some scathing references to “pyramidiots”—along with reinforcement of the idea that the Pyramids were monuments of national cohesion, built with Egyptian sweat and blood. In return, he was accused by antagonists of having a role in various dark conspiracies, and rumored to have access to the Great Pyramid from a secret tunnel leading from his bathroom. As David Sims, his American friend in Cairo, recalled, this was how Hawass established himself internationally—“by becoming a spokesman for rationality, put up against the crazies. . . . And he quickly found out he had a charismatic personality.”

In time, according to Hawass, visitors to Giza “came not to see the Pyramids but first to see me.” Amr Badr, an Egyptian businessman close to Hawass, compared his friend’s strategy to the way King Fahd of Saudi Arabia took the title of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, in the nineteen-eighties. “Zahi became the Custodian of the Pyramids,” he said. “It was very smart branding.”

In the disagreements between Hawass and the alternative theorists, there were doubtless some strands of heartfelt argument on both sides. But it’s hard not to think of the debate as primarily taking the form of professional wrestling—especially when one recalls that Hawass was willing to contribute to “The Pyramids, the Sphinx, the Mystery,” a discussion between him and key supporters of the unorthodox position, held on an Alaskan cruise ship in the late nineties. His opponents sold their books, while Hawass, his profile raised, was able to lure tourists to Egypt—a particularly urgent need after the 1997 Islamist terrorist attack at Hatshepsut’s temple, which killed sixty-four people. Hawass—in whom there seems to be a perfect alignment of national and personal ambitions—has never felt sufficiently antagonized by the unscientific approach to want to give up the language of spooky Egypt: he’ll say that a Sphinx “talks” to him, or bemoan a “curse” on his CAT scanner. He has never hindered the representation of ancient Egypt as a place midway between history and dream. When he promoted the millennial celebrations at the Pyramids—which had as their daunting centerpiece a twelve-hour Jean-Michel Jarre opera—Hawass was happy to hint at the supernatural: “Who knows? It could be that something incredible will happen here.”

One morning, Hawass was driven to Saqqara, twenty miles southwest of Giza. On a creaking, hand-winched rope, he was lowered—standing upright, with one foot in a bucket—forty feet down a shaft into a recently discovered tomb where some mummies were still in place. The bucket came back up for me. “Two sealed coffins made of wood and one limestone sarcophagus completely intact since antiquity,” Hawass said when I joined him, sounding a little like an auctioneer. He explained that these were twenty-five-hundred-year-old bodies in a shaft from a much earlier period. He showed me a mummified dog.

Returning to the surface, we walked with a phalanx of S.C.A. employees up to the Step Pyramid—the prototype built a century or two before its larger neighbors at Giza. Leaving behind the crowd, and the heat, we went inside. A low passageway, closed to the public, led toward the pyramid’s center. Hawass moved nimbly, in a kind of crouching trot, saying, “The restoration of the Step Pyramid is one of the most important projects that ever happened in my life. Everyone was frightened to do anything with it, and it was falling apart.” Speaking more generally, he went on, “You need to be dedicated, you need to sit under the sun, you need to suffer. Those people”—the men who had surrounded his S.U.V. the moment it stopped—“some of them are not ready to suffer.” The corridor ended after a hundred feet or so, at a point partway up one side of a tall, wide shaft that an S.C.A. team had recently cleared of debris. The space rose above us and fell away below us. “I think what I did is too much for people in Egypt,” Hawass said. “I don’t think that people can stand all this change. They could not understand it—they think I am too powerful. I am not too powerful—I do not want to be too powerful. I want to do something for my country. I did many things for myself, through what I did for my country.”

Before returning to Cairo, we stopped at the site’s new visitor center. Hawass is well travelled, observant, and patriotic, and this leads to a punishing, Naipaulian kind of self-consciousness, in which he allows himself to see his country as a critical foreigner might. I saw his frustration with the inexpert Egyptian waiters at a showy Japanese restaurant on a riverboat in Cairo—a place where Hawass’s order is, simply, “The Zahi menu!” Later, in Alexandria—where Hawass joined the regional governor at a series of openings and inspections, moving from place to place in what became a frantic, horn-honking convoy of ten cars—we visited the Royal Jewelry Museum, undergoing a gorgeous renovation. It’s an early-twentieth-century mock-European villa with golden ceilings, naked nymphs on the bathroom walls, and windows of painted glass, showing scenes of wigged and bustled lovers. Here Hawass lost his temper over the ugliness of new leather chairs furnishing a small room set aside for future visiting V.I.P.s.

Now, at Saqqara’s visitor center, Hawass berated a shy young woman staff member for failing to monitor the lights properly in a room where an introductory film was about to be shown. (It featured awed, sonorous commentary from Omar Sharif.) Hawass then berated the director of the center, too. “I insulted him,” Hawass explained when we sat down briefly in a courtyard and drank cups of coffee. “I said, ‘Why didn’t you teach this lady what she should do! You have to, or I will move you.’ That’s what I said.” He stood up. “Yalla. Let’s go.” We began to walk out, but he stopped to use the just finished bathroom. I was waiting in the courtyard when I heard him call for me, and I followed him in. “This is beautiful, isn’t it?” he asked.

Hawass became secretary-general of the S.C.A. in January, 2002. (Though he moved into the agency’s headquarters, in Cairo, he kept his old office at the Pyramids.) He now had responsibility not only for Egypt’s ancient past but for its Islamic, Coptic, and Jewish heritage, too. His friend David Sims said that when Hawass took the job “myself and others—we were worried. A lot of pressure, and serious stress, and he had this heart problem.” Hawass had a heart attack in the early nineties. “One would have thought he’d have blown a fuse, but evidently he’s fine. He stopped smoking, except for sheeshas. He seems to have thrived with the pressure and all the visibility—and he works hard.” Egypt is believed to have some six million government employees not in uniform. Sims described many of the thirty thousand people who work below Hawass as “crusty, Nasserist-period people who spend their time clinging to jobs.” He explained, “Under the surface, there are a lot of things he has to put up with and do that most people don’t see, and hats off to him.”

One day, Hawass said to me, “To control all this, you have to make them fear you and make them love you at the same time.” Hawass’s strongest skills are perhaps managerial, or proprietorial: he’s in the business of striking fear and making deals and squeezing advantage out of Egypt’s monopoly on Egyptian soil. I joined him one morning at his gym, in the Sheraton Hotel, where he lifted weights while shouting, “To lead, you have to be strong!”

Terry Garcia, the National Geographic Society executive, who has worked with Hawass on both television programs and the “Tutankhamun” exhibition, told me, “He is a very tough negotiator. He knows what he wants. He is extraordinarily bright and perceptive—that means you’d better know what you’re doing when you go in, and you’d better know how you’re going to get it, because he does. He tells you up front and throughout the process that his objective is to do whatever is in the best interests of Egypt.” I asked Garcia about a stunningly anticlimactic live broadcast in 2002, shown on the National Geographic Channel, in which a robot was sent into a shaft in the Great Pyramid. The machine drilled through a blocking stone, or door, only to reveal another stone beyond. “What we have seen tonight is totally unique within the world of Egyptology,” Hawass said on the air. “The presence of a second door only deepens the intrigue.” Garcia said of the show, “It seemed like a great idea.” But, given the expense and the complications, “it’s safe to say we’ll be very careful about live events in the future.”

In 2005, Hawass accepted a proposal from A.E.G., the sports-arena owner and events organizer, to take Tutankhamun back on the road, with an explicit ambition of making money. Andres Numhauser, the exhibitions executive, works for Arts and Exhibitions International, an A.E.G. subsidiary, and he told me that Hawass had “professionalized exhibitions,” adding, “Egyptians don’t appreciate what he’s doing.” A.E.G. agreed to pay Egypt for access to a few dozen of its thousands of Tutankhamun artifacts, and to involve the National Geographic Society, whose name would go on the poster. Any museum that took the show would be given a share of the ticket proceeds, but it would have to stomach the loss of almost all curatorial control. In San Francisco, for example, the de Young Museum was able to veto items in the exhibition’s accompanying gift store, and it ruled out a tissue box whose papers exit through the nose in a Pharaoh’s mask. Beyond that, the museum was the provider of floor space. John Norman, the C.E.O. of Arts and Exhibitions International, said, “We lay it out, we bring all the elements—the cases, the text panels, the lighting, everything is ours. Where they have input is in the label copy. Their curator might want to say the same thing that’s on that label but in a different way, and we give them the opportunity to edit. And there might be a two-per-cent change.”

When I met Hawass in San Francisco in June, he dined with, among others, Norman and Numhauser, and Sameh Shoukry, Egypt’s Ambassador to the United States. He ordered three-hundred-dollar bottles of wine and took a commanding pleasure in his role. Drawing laughs by parodying his savage negotiating style, he gave advice on a “Tutankhamun”-related dispute: “Don’t discuss it! It’s done. I will cut off his head.”

Hawass’s chutzpah has doubtless made Egypt money and buttressed tourism. He has encouraged the careers of young Egyptian archeologists, and may even have made a dent in Egyptian popular indifference toward the country’s ancient heritage. (He’s well enough known to be imitated by TV comedians.) He has declared a moratorium on new excavations in all but the damper Delta region of northern Egypt, where conditions make it more likely that ancient objects might decay in the ground; the decision has generally been supported by Egyptologists. And dozens of foreign teams continue to work in the country, on existing projects or on new digs in the north. (Hawass says that some foreign archeologists are “assholes,” but concedes that others have done “good work for Egypt.”)

Hawass has also championed the idea that some key Egyptian artifacts in foreign collections should be repatriated, including the Rosetta stone, long displayed in the British Museum, and the bust of Nefertiti now in the Neues Museum, in Berlin. (Dietrich Wildung, the former director of the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection, also in Berlin, where the bust was held until a few weeks ago, has been fiercely attacked by Hawass in the past. He sighed when, recently, he was asked about the bust: “I like Zahi very much, and I appreciate, really, what he has done for the consciousness of the Egyptian people concerning their national past.”) In October, Hawass secured the return, from the Louvre, of five wall-painting fragments stolen from an area near the Valley of the Kings in the nineteen-eighties.

Hawass describes himself as “decisive,” in a culture “where people are afraid to make decisions.” Mohamed al-Fatah, one of Hawass’s senior executives, said to me, “It’s a revolution—Dr. Zahi’s revolution.” The flip side is bluster, shaded with a quality that seems unlikely to be rewarded in archeology: impatience. Egyptology has as its international spokesman someone for whom all discourse tends toward propaganda. I was with Hawass in San Francisco when he ran into an American financial supporter, a woman with an air of late-period Katharine Hepburn. (“See, I have my cartouche on today,” she told Hawass. “I couldn’t find Nefertiti. It must be on the ship. I live on a ship part time.”) He introduced me to her, adding, “She’s a rich lady,” then asked her for a million dollars. The donation would support a Zahi Hawass chair at the American University in Cairo, he said, but—in a curious back-and-forth—he seemed unable to explain how the fund differed from an educational foundation to which she had already contributed. He said that it was the same fund. But wasn’t that to support a prize for exceptional students? “It’s tax-deductible,” Hawass replied.

His attention was on the pitch, not on the product. Hawass’s conversational ambition always seems to be submission rather than engagement. Seen, inflamed and agitated, beside a five-thousand-year-old monument, he can appear to be enacting a proverb about the follies of a choleric life. And when he speaks of ancient Egypt he often appears so determined to signpost excitement—“the most important site in the world”; “the most amazing thing I did in my life”—that real excitement is hard to detect. You watch a man who is thinking only about being watched. In Hawass’s hands, “something becomes the world’s most wonderful mummy even though there are twenty thousand like it,” Salima Ikram said, adding, “If everything’s equally marvellous, then what’s truly marvellous and what’s not?”

And Hawass is a frustratingly unreliable source of information. When Joann Fletcher, the once banished British archeologist, identified a mummy as Nefertiti, Hawass’s response was to identify the same mummy as a teen-age girl—too young to have been the Queen—and then say that it was more likely to be male, and then deny that he had ever said it was female. (Hawass now denies that he ever said that it could be male.) Hawass will vastly exaggerate the number of replica Zahi Hawass hats that have sold for charity. Or he’ll claim, implausibly, that he is aware of nobody in Egypt who feels religious discomfort about the country’s pre-Islamic heritage. He told me that when he showed Obama around the Pyramids he grew to have a better understanding of him than all but the President’s closest confidants. “We became friends from the first minute,” he said. “I told him George Lucas came here to find out how my hat became more famous than Harrison Ford’s.”

Hawass’s driver picks him up each morning in his apartment in central Cairo and takes him to the gym and then to the office, where he works without pause, apparently sustained by no more than a can of Diet 7UP, brought to him on a saucer in the early afternoon. In the evenings, he eats with friends, such as Omar Sharif. (“He speaks a lot about women,” Sharif told me. “I don’t very much because I’m getting older and older.”) At exactly ten o’clock, even if someone is in mid-sentence, Hawass brings dinner to a close and then visits a café close to home, where, for an hour or so, he plays backgammon or watches soccer on TV. He works through the weekend.

At the end of October, Hawass was appointed Vice-Minister of Culture, with control of the S.C.A. Prior to this promotion, Hawass, as a civil servant, had been facing mandatory retirement next spring. He now serves at the President’s pleasure, and will be able to follow a desire to attach his name—and Egypt’s—to one spectacular, Tutankhamun-level discovery before his career is over. If he is to have that glory, then it seems likely that it will derive from one of two places. Officially, Hawass leads the team exploring the temple of Taposiris Magna, thirty miles west of Alexandria, where Kathleen Martinez expects to find Cleopatra. (He visits when he can—as I was able to observe, he can reach Alexandria, a hundred and forty miles away from Cairo, in little more than an hour.)

I met Martinez in Cairo. She was wearing dark eye makeup that made reference to Cleopatra. Martinez was previously a successful criminal-defense attorney; she had no formal training in archeology when she arrived in Cairo, in 2005. But she had made an intensive private study of Cleopatra and—apparently thanks to some combination of sharp reasoning, verve, and personal wealth—she persuaded Hawass of the strength of a theory that the Queen and Mark Antony were buried at Taposiris Magna, and not at a site now underwater, as others have guessed. The S.C.A. provided a team of Egyptian archeologists and workers, at times a hundred strong; Martinez has paid for some aspects of the work. “He told me that if there’s only a one-per-cent chance that you can find the tomb of the last queen, we should do it,” she said. Martinez was grateful for Hawass’s support, but acknowledged that “he put a lot of pressure on me. He asks all the time. When he comes to the site, we have to have something important for him.”

I later discovered that the press had been misled, at least once, at Taposiris Magna. In April, Hawass spoke to journalists at the temple, and showed them a number of objects that he said had been recently discovered there, including a gray granite life-size fragment of a face, tentatively identified as an image of Mark Antony. Hawass was photographed holding the piece, and its discovery was included in stories published around the world—by Time, the Associated Press, National Geographic, and others. A Hawass press release explicitly claimed that the fragment had been found by the Dominican-Egyptian expedition. So did a newspaper column by Hawass. The claim was false: the face fragment had been found long before Martinez ever reached Taposiris Magna. A Hungarian archeological team worked at the site from 1998 to 2004, and found the fragment in October, 2000. It was described and photographed in two reports published by the team, in 2001 and 2004. In order for the fragment to have been presented as a new discovery at Hawass’s press conference, it must have been removed from its place in the collection of the Greco-Roman Museum, in Alexandria, which is currently closed for renovation. When asked about this, Hawass called it a mixup—“an honest mistake.”

Hawass’s other, greater hope is to find a new royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings, across the Nile from the city of Luxor, about three hundred and fifty miles south of Cairo. This is where Carter found Tutankhamun. “It really is the dream of his life,” Brando Quilici told me. Known tombs in the Valley are numbered from KV1 to KV63. “I’m hoping to end my career by making the discovery of the tomb of KV64,” Hawass noted in a speech at the de Young Museum.

Before leaving Egypt, I visited Luxor and neighboring sites. I was met at the airport by Mostafa Waziry, a senior S.C.A. officer whose wife, he said, complains that he has started to talk like Hawass. “He’s a diehard man!” Waziry shouted affably. “Is Dr. Hawass working seven days a week? Of course not! He’s working twelve days a week! I work seven days a week. He’s working twenty days a week!”

We drove around in rising heat, and Waziry overwhelmed me with marvels of ancient Egypt, including the Temple of Hatshepsut and—after a phone call from Hawass, and some nuclear-code-ish synchronization of keys—the startlingly lovely wall paintings in the Tomb of Nefertari, which are now closed to the public. But, as Waziry pointed out various S.C.A. initiatives of recent years, I began to realize how much of this work had been included in a scathing UNESCO report last year, which decided that S.C.A.-sanctioned activity posed “a real threat to the authenticity and integrity” of the area, which is a World Heritage site. Hawass had told me that Luxor is “where people should come to learn how they can manage a site,” but UNESCO disagrees. For example, the unearthing of the “Avenue of the Sphinxes,” now under way in the center of the city, has required the demolition of buildings that UNESCO regarded as integral. The process also risks cutting the town in two and exposing the monuments to decay, the report claimed. On the other side of the Nile, on the approach to the Valley of the Kings, the village of Gurnah has been largely demolished; UNESCO described Gurnah as “part of the archeological landscape ever since investigations in the West Bank began” and “an inseparable part of the values of the property.” As we drove by the now bare hillside, Waziry said that the village’s former inhabitants had been “very happy” to be relocated. He also observed that two recently explored tombs, where the village used to stand, had been designated Z1 and Z2—after Zahi Hawass. An Egyptologist familiar with the area told me that he was “horrified” by the speed and scale of the work done at Gurnah. (Hawass recently defended the project and noted that twenty-five of the village’s three hundred homes had been marked for conservation.)

In the Valley of the Kings, Waziry walked me across a new parking lot—“room for two hundred buses at one time,” he said—then past visitors from Europe and Asia. We stepped over a rope and left the public path to clamber up a deep gully that until recently did not exist. Salima Ikram, in Cairo, had explained to me that, until a year and a half ago, when the search for a new tomb began, the area looked very different. “They’ve gone down to bedrock, everywhere, to the valley floor.” The Egyptologist familiar with the area, referring to this work, said, with feeling, “Archeology is not a treasure hunt.”

It was midsummer, and work had stopped for the season, but the original level of loose rock was suggested by a small piece of modern graffiti, far above head height: Hawass had signed his name. We walked back, past the entrance to the tomb of Tutankhamun—KV62—where his mummy, now separated from its golden funeral mask, lies unadorned in a clear, climate-controlled box, a sheet pulled up to its neck. For my benefit, Waziry did an impression of a woman who, not long ago, on seeing Zahi Hawass at this spot, is said to have fainted with excitement. ♦

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